Deplanetizer: Aftermath
by AimTrekRaider7
Summary: After the fall from the Deplanetizer, Nefarious wakes up heavily injured and alone. His primary concern is survival at all costs. (Gore warnings where necessary inside) Set in the 2016 reboot.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Notes:  
-This is set in the 2016 film timeline, taking a more... gritty(?) approach.  
-Spoilers?  
-I know it's a kids' film, but the end scene of the Deplanetizer crash site seems to trivialise the whole 'surviving a crash from space and then being pulled apart by robots and converted into a different type of lifeform' thing.  
-I like digging way too much into kids' stuff. I'm only doing this for fun though :)

Sorry for ruining your film, Insomniac!

Had there been a single soul on Umbris that day, they would have borne witness to a sight both fascinating and terrible. A gargantuan machine falling lifeless from the sky; debris from internal damage and entry into the planet's atmosphere scattering around it. The final few escape pods being launched in a desperate attempt to avoid the fate that was rapidly becoming inevitable. Bodies, too, of the few Blarg unfortunate enough not to have made their way out sooner. The chemicals that had once helped in the upkeep of numerous machines falling as a toxic rain. Smoke and the orange glow that accompany widespread fires. The sound of shrieking metal, sirens and horrified screams growing to an almighty cacophony as the first pieces of debris hit the floor...

Minutes later, the shifting, sliding sea of destruction had stilled. The dust that had been raised by the deluge of scrap had begun to settle. The only sounds to be heard were the occasional groaning of metal, or a loud clatter as something somewhere gave way under the weight of something else. Deep within the twisting, convoluted mound of pipes, sections of crumpled wall and tangled masses of cables, the only survivor stirred. The lights on the armoured suit that had given him some protection against the impact of the fall dimmed, and went out. The protection afforded to him had barely been enough to keep him alive and the last remnants of power had finally drained away. Many of the bones in his body had been damaged, with some broken and protruding grotesquely from beneath the skin. His breathing was laboured and interrupted by sporadic fits of coughing, which devolved into gagging and retching at the chemical fumes, smoke and dust. With great difficulty he eased himself upright, pulling his thoughts together through the fog that was beginning to descend in his mind. Though the Deplanetizer had been built for destructive purposes, it had also been built with the capacity to support organic life. This meant that somewhere within the wreckage there would be medical supplies with which to patch his broken body.

Sitting up made his head ache. This alongside the searing pain of fractured bones and the tearing sensation of these snagging under his skin made him feel ill. Squinting through grime-caked glasses at the opening to a precarious looking tunnel, he considered the few options left to him. Aside from the tunnel there was no exit from the small nook in which he had woken up. He had most of the Deplanetizer looming over him, threatening to collapse at any moment - a horrendous irony, and one that he would have found great pleasure in, had it not been his own life at risk. The smog was already burning his eyes and airways, likely the cause of the blood that trickled constantly down the back of his throat. There would be no rescue, regardless of whether or not he called for it; he carried nothing with which to make such a call and it was doubtful that there would be anyone listening for one. His thoughts returned to the tunnel ahead. Pieces of floor panelling had caught on the lip on the edge of a fuel tank and formed a haphazard roof. The fuel tank was still connected to a large, flexible pipe, which continued around a corner and out of sight. There was also a large girder that he would need to climb over partially blocking the entrance. He took as deep a breath as he could manage and started forwards.

With limited mobility the best he could do was to reach out for a handhold and pull himself along. This developed into a half-crawl as he began to work out how best to manoeuvre. Reaching the girder he tested his weight on the edge, feeling it shift slightly as he did so. Once it seemed unlikely to move further he carried on. Half sitting, half lying on the heavy piece of scrap he started to pull himself across. Without warning, the girder gave way and he fell into the tunnel, landing painfully on his front. This winded him, and he spent a few moments lying there gasping. He felt drained, and wanted nothing more than to allow himself to fall asleep. A loud metallic bang woke him from his stupor and he flinched, bringing his legs to his chest and curling into a ball. Small pieces of something rained down on him through a gap in the patchwork roof, accompanied by a liquid that fizzed on contact with his suit. When all was still and the mystery liquid had stopped fizzing he raised his head. The corrosive substance had eaten through the fabric of his suit and discoloured the layer he wore underneath. If it had reached his skin he was already in too much pain to notice. He sat up again, face contorting with the effort. Exhaustion was beginning to take its toll, making it harder for him to keep his goal clear in his mind. His arms shook as he moved to pull himself forwards and collapsed beneath him uselessly before he could follow through. All thought of medical supplies left him. As his mind finally shut down he began to lose sensation in his body, and some part of him became mildly concerned that this was not something that could be woken up from…


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Notes:  
-Note to self: next time I'm planning on running an evil space station, buy some good quality, intelligent repair bots  
-Leave a review if you like!

Lying in a small tunnel under a mountainous pile of scrap, protected from the wreckage above only by a few broken floor panels, Nefarious slept. Of the darkening of the sky outside and the decreasing temperature he was unaware, and the distant rolls of thunder did nothing to wake him. A small robot, blackened and dented but otherwise unharmed, peered at him from between the panels. It swept a beam of light over the prone figure, taking in the apparent damage and negligible movement. This figure was clearly synthetic, as its metal appendages would suggest. It then performed a structural scan to determine the extent of the damage and found much of the internal support structure to be unsound. Upon further analysis of the gathered data, the repair unit found no information in its database with which to identify the synthetic. Most of its external components were recognised but the internal parts, though mechanical in nature, were constructed from an unfamiliar material and served unknown purposes. Repairs could be performed on these only after closer examination. The repair unit sent out a signal to all other units in the vicinity, requesting assistance with the current task. Alongside this it sent a list of parts, materials and tools necessary for the repair. As other units began to arrive the confines of the tunnel became an unsuitable location in which to work, so the decision was made to move the synthetic elsewhere.

It was the sensation of dragging to which Nefarious awoke. The pain of involuntary movement was central to his thoughts, feeling bones scraping against each other and flesh bruising with each small bump. Once the pain had fully registered it occurred to him to question why he was moving at all. He twisted his head round to look behind him and recognised the small, round face of a repair bot. The pipes, rails and walls around him were well lit, so he assumed it had taken more than one to move him. His next thought was to question where they were going. He hoped it was outside as the groans and clangs of buckling metal were becoming more and more frequent, and the whole place seemed closer than ever to collapsing. The bots turned a corner and his body was squeezed rather awkwardly between an air cycler and a dusty sheet of stained plastic. The pressure on his chest sent him into another bout of coughing, which the bots ignored. It was only when he hooked his arm behind a protruding wall section to hold himself still for a moment that they took notice of his return to consciousness. He was set upon immediately. They wrenched his arms behind his back and held his legs together, then lifted him off the ground. He twisted and thrashed, regardless of the pain it caused. Pulling one of his legs free, he kicked out at one of the bots and felt something in his ankle click. It sent a tingling sensation up his leg, which would no longer move below the knee. He gave up, and the bots continued on their path. In a haze of pain and nausea he lost track once again of where they were.

A short time later he was dropped, unceremoniously, onto a cold and rocky floor. His nose was the first thing to hit the ground and he felt the crunch of dislocated cartilage, then the throbbing that accompanied a bleeding nose. The shock of another full body impact froze him in place as his mind struggled to comprehend so much sensory input. Before he had time to recover he was lifted again, this time on one side, then dropped onto his back. The wings of his suit absorbed most of the landing but left him lying at an odd angle so that he ended up glaring down his broken nose at the culprits. The expression on his face that would have made his minions wet themselves in fear had no effect on the repair bots. They looked on in disinterest, communicating with each other silently.  
"What-" he croaked, then cleared his throat and started again, "What are you doing?"  
He received no response. Now that he had used his voice he realised just how dry his throat was. The blood from his nose that ran down his throat as much as his face did nothing to improve his condition.  
"Is there anything to drink around here?"  
One of the bots left. There was no way of knowing if this was in response to his question. He took the time to look at his surroundings, and noticed that he was inside a section of the outer shell of the Deplanetizer. Over to his left, just out of arm's reach, was a pile of scrap materials and parts both mechanical and electronic. The light from the bots shone too brightly in his face for him to make out exactly what was there but he was certain that it had not appeared there by chance.

The repair bots watched the unusual synthetic as it shifted on the ground, examining its environment. With the unpredictability of this model there would be restraint required to prevent it from attempting to leave during the repair. No fuel system, generator or battery was apparent, which meant that the unit could not easily be powered off. Repairs would have to be performed with the unit fully powered until a more efficient system could be installed. The first stage of the operation after suitably restraining the synthetic would be to strip the outer layers until the working parts were accessible. Being the part most in need of replacing, the endoskeleton would be disconnected, removed and replaced piece by piece in order to avoid hardware conflicts. The new power system would then be installed and external appendages reattached. As a final step the fragile outer shell would be replaced with a sturdier material. To quieten it before the repair they offered the synthetic the remnants of a canister of oil, which it seemed reluctant to drink. Once its head was held in place all protestation stopped and it drank willingly.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Notes:

-Gore warning, sort of. Probably only mild gore, but still. Nefarious is about to be pulled apart by robots.  
-Seriously though, these are some dim bots.

The oil was thick, and had a strong chemical taste. It was more viscous than he was expecting, and he regretted letting the repair bots pour it down his throat. It was the only thing he'd swallowed that wasn't his own blood, and the aftertaste of iron and chemicals made him gag. He had asked about something to drink, and he wondered if that mostly empty canister of engine oil really was the only convenient thing around. The other option led his thoughts to possibilities he'd been trying to avoid thinking about. His eyes kept drifting over to the pile of scrap on his left, combing through the gloom for any detail he had previously missed that would make clear to him what the bots had prepared. Looking closer at his silent floating audience he spotted a bot towards the back with an arc welding attachment. Another had a rotator attachment fitted with a circular saw blade, and the one at the front of the group held a pair of tin snips. It was easing the snips open and closed. The small squeaks this produced seemed loud in his ears, and he was reminded of just how isolated he had become on this wasteland planet. The panic he had been reigning in until now spiked with every squeak, threatening to overwhelm him entirely. When the bot with the snips moved forwards he kicked himself back with the leg he could still use and batted the snips away. Two more bots came forwards, this time with gravity clamps, which they used to pin his arms in place at his sides. He could no longer move, and he had no defence.

His last resort was a feeble one.  
"I demand that you stop!"  
The two bots that had pinned him took hold of his shoulders and pulled him upright.  
"Hey! I'm not synthetic, you hear me?"  
His voice wavered as they continued to ignore him. The bot holding the tin snips disappeared behind him and he felt it cut into the armoured part of his suit.  
"Check your database - I'm Doctor Nefarious! I'm organic!"  
The tin snips stopped at his collar, which was too thick for the blades to fit round. To his horror, the bot with the circular saw blade moved in to take over. He brought his head forwards and down as far as it would go, straining against the bots at his shoulders to put as much distance as possible between himself and imminent danger. There was an ear-splitting whine as the carbide coated blade touched metal. A few tense seconds later the saw stopped, and his armour and wings were removed. The sharp edges of the fresh cut grazed his neck and he could feel small beads of blood trickling down into the collar of his shirt. The bots laid him down again, and this time he could feel cold stone beneath his back. He shuddered. By this point there was no doubt that he had been mistaken for a synthetic, and there appeared to be nothing left to say or do about it.

After the removal of external appendages the repair bots started work on exposing the endoskeleton. The outer layers proved mostly easy to remove, after it was discovered that anything with a sharp enough edge could be pushed through. Almost immediately there came more resistance from the synthetic. It had likely suffered processor damage in the fall as its protests were either incoherent or inaccurate. Its complaints increased in frequency as more of its internal structure was exposed, and further gravity clamps were required to keep it still. The liquid it had been losing as the process went on seemed to have coated everything and was forming a pool on the ground. Tools that had started clean were now a dark red, with small chunks of scrap caught in corners or cracks. Only a few minutes into the procedure it grew quiet and fought less against its restraints. This rapid decline in activity prompted another scan, revealing a failing processor and an overall loss of system power. Much discussion was then held concerning this sudden change. No internal parts had been damaged and the large mass assumed to be the processor had been left untouched. The source of the problem was deemed to be power failure, so the current priority was changed from structural repair and replacement to the connection of a power source to the processor.

He faded in and out of consciousness. Even without the weight of the gravity clamps he would have been unable to move. Using sheer brute force the bots had dug straight down to bone and scooped entire sections of muscle and fat off his skeleton. They had started with a large shard of glass, pushing it into his upper arm until it hit bone and moving it around to widen the cut. In a similar manner to carving meat, flesh was parted from bone. There was no resistance as the industrially hardened glass cut smoothly through clothing, skin and muscle. He began to feel breathless, and he realised that he had been screaming. The sight of his own bone exposed and glistening with blood made him feel sick. The wound was already bleeding profusely, warm blood soaking into his clothes and spilling onto the ground. While he had been distracted his boots had been removed and as the glass was reinserted further down his arm, a piece of metal with ragged edges, razor sharp and rather warped, sliced into his shin. This produced something closer to a tear than a cut, the metal skidding along his shin and ripping unevenly through the muscle. He was aware this time of the sound of a wet 'squish' as flesh fell away in two places. His shrieks were silent, his throat being too dry to produce the amplitude of the noise. The feeling of light-headedness increased by the second as blood loss took its toll. He continued to cry out silently as the bots cut away at his body, listening to the dripping of blood and the soft tearing of his skin. In some places he was fairly certain they had managed to destroy his nerve endings, leaving him with only a vague sensation of incredible pain. His vision had mostly clouded over by this point, and breathing had become difficult. Numbness was slowly replacing the pain and shutting down his mind.


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Notes:

-This wasn't originally going to be this long, but here we are anyway.  
-More gore (I think) incoming!

Hovering in the state between awake and not, a bright flash woke him up. There was something lodged in the back of his head and it brought the odd sensation of connection. He waited for an indefinite amount of time for his senses to return, to prove to him that he was still alive, and eventually the sound tools working and machines running filtered through to him. Most of the sound was distant, but he could hear the odd click and scrape very close by. His sight returned soon after, and he could see the aftermath of something he was glad to have missed. The removal of his flesh had been completed. Suspended in the air in full view most of his skeleton was revealed, shiny, red and littered with chips, scrapes and gouges. Stripped clean as it was he felt nothing as little metal fingers were pushed into his joints to pry them apart. It was at this point that he began to wonder how he was still alive. The only part of him that was left intact was his head, which explained the retention of his sight and his now extremely limited sense of touch. While he was pondering this conundrum, a pair of metal fingers began to pluck at his eyelid. Had he a body, this would have sent enough adrenaline through him to make him ill. As his situation currently was, he felt nothing. His mind was in complete panic and he screwed his eyes shut, hoping that the plucking would stop. It didn't. His eyelid was lifted, then a metal finger was forced in. The sharp edges ruptured something, and fluid mixed with his tears. He could barely react to the pain with so little of himself left, but his jaw moved slightly, his mouth forming the shapes of the sounds he could no longer make. Chunks of vitreous were hooked out of his socket, trailing sclera and revealing his optic nerve. Though most of the eye was now in pieces he still saw the flash of light and sparks as the nerve was cut. The pain was excruciating, and his senses fizzled out again.

The next time he awoke he appeared to be alone. He felt nothing. His eyes wouldn't open and for a moment, he wondered if he still had any. The memory of the loss of his eye came back to him, and he could clearly feel the sharp pain and see the sparks in his vision before he lost consciousness. The clarity of this memory disturbed him so he deliberately turned his thoughts away, and the pain disappeared. Instead he focused on another concerning matter. He felt nothing. The empty void was an excellent respite from the horrors he had just lived through, but he was well aware that he had just survived a crash-landing in a high profile, illegally operated space station. Eventually the authorities would come to scour the wreckage, first with their long-range scanners for a general sweep, then with a team of specialists who would dig out any survivors and illicit materials. After that would come an assortment of scavengers, crooks and pirates, looking to make a profit off any leftover scrap and abandoned equipment or set up a new base of operations. As he couldn't be sure what his current condition actually was there could be no guarantee of avoiding detection. He considered his situation carefully. He had been dismantled in the manner of a broken machine. Whether or not he had been 'repaired' he could not tell, and if he had been reassembled it was not immediately obvious. The delicate balance between panic and frustration that had been helping to maintain his coherent thoughts slipped, and for a moment his mind seared with anger at the repair bots. If he could just find one he would take great pleasure in ripping it apart, hearing snapping of circuitry and the crack of plastic, along with the high-pitched electronic whine it would emit. The vision became strong in his mind until he could clearly see the shape of the thing, and he so desperately wanted to find one that something in him clicked.

A string of information formed in his mind and rapidly became a web, a mess of data that needed sorting. Firstly, and most importantly, there were no powered machines nearby. His surroundings were lifeless and still so his plans for vengeance would have to wait. He hadn't moved from where he last knew himself to be, the temperature was warm, and he could hear something intangible and vague. It was internal, yet not something that originated from him. As he concentrated harder he realised that it was some form of signal - a galactic radio signal, in fact. Another piece of data connected itself and he could recognise the frequency to be one of Solana's popular music channels. There were other signals too, other channels and ship communications, both of which he left alone. Sifting through the information became easier as he continued, until everything was organised into place and he had a solid grasp on his surroundings. All that was left for him to do was wonder at how all of this had happened. It occurred to him that the data collected looked much like the result of a scan, so to prove his theory he tried it again. The 'click' happened and the same information was returned. There were minor variations here and there, but with no conscious thought these were automatically sorted. He pondered this for a moment then tried another scan, this time of what he assumed to be himself. Almost immediately he became aware of a large network of parts and as he attempted to fill in the gaps of this new blueprint he was surprised at how comfortably he was retaining the information. He could retrieve it at will while processing numerous changes, and he was rapidly mapping out his new body. Soon after he had a full image that showed in detail every screw and cable he had to work with.

After devoting his full attention elsewhere, his mood had improved greatly. His main aim was still to leave Umbris before the arrival of the authorities, and now he had the beginnings of a plan. The priority was to get himself working. A pair of optical sensors with lenses and shutters were situated roughly where he once had eyes, and these were connected to an appropriate port on his motherboard. He activated the port manually and immediately an error was returned. 'Device unrecognised. Install appropriate driver.' He tried again with the microphones that he assumed were to replace his ears. There was some success in this as he was already equipped with a generic audio driver, but with no further settings for adjustment his hearing was left somewhat muted. From another port he followed a group of cables down into his body, connecting components until he had control of every moving part. Paying close attention to his internal gyroscope he attempted to sit up. The sound of grinding and clicking filtered through to him, and the gyroscope told him that his body was vertical. He verified this with another scan, and for the first time he noticed the large organic mass nearby. A liquid had formed a pool around it and the surrounding area also showed signs of the same organic matter. He moved his foot almost subconsciously and heard the scrape of metal against rock, then a small splash. In that moment he remembered the sound of flesh hitting the floor and the rich, metallic scent of blood. The smell stayed with him as he came out of the memory, but mingled with the familiar tang there was the undertone of festering meat. His mind went blank. Eventually the key part of the plan returned to him; a poor plan from the start but all he really had left. He had a contact, one he could almost trust, from whom he had received an offer of service. The message to his contact was short, and after its delivery he shut down to wait.


End file.
